It won't render....

hello,
I have a pretty beefy project here, 131 layers, none of which can be nested, camera moves and lights. I go to render it, the first 28 frames go, then nothing, it just stops. Any thoughts?
cheers
-michael

right before the render stalls, can you tell what the ram usage is (ae displays 'ram' at the top of the render queue). if the value is close to the max ram cache setting in the memory and cache settings, you may want to enable the 'purge every xx frames' option in the secret pref.

to do that, hold the shift key and select a preference in ae (any preference). then select the preference pulldown, and at the bottom there should be one called 'secret'. choose it and then set the purge every xx frames to less than where you were seeing a crash... in your case, 20 seems good.

if the render failure is not related to the ram usage, look at what might be happening in the comp at the time that it fails... are there any layers that appear or effects that kick in around that point? they hiding those layers or disabling the effects to see if you can get it to render beyond 28 frames. then you should be able to pinpoint the issue and come up with a work around.

have you tried a render starting at frame 28 or 29? that may be a quick way to tell if it is a bad effect that is halting the render.... if it can't render at all, then it is probably related to something that happens in the comp at that point. if it render fine for 28 more frames, then it is probably something else.

Okay, i tried the purge thing, i'm only using 23% of my ram, so i don't think its that. This time i got 11 frames into the render and got an error message window that says "After Effects error: opening movie-you do not have permission to open this file (-54).
what does that mean?

[Michael Cline]"i got 11 frames into the render and got an error message window that says "After Effects error: opening movie-you do not have permission to open this file (-54)."

That specific error message leads me to believe that you're on a Mac and that you recently installed Quicktime 7.4. Well, Apple screwed it up: QT 7.4 is very bad for AE users. The fix is now available as QT 7.4.1 on the Apple web site.